The lowly onion gets glamour lessons from Davasha Stalarow, the executive chef at Houston’s new 8.0 restaurant. The Dallas-based 8.0 (3745 Greenbriar, Houston) has long prided itself on being a bastion of home cooking away from home, specializing in healthful food to nourish both body and soul.

The Houston outpost keeps the same menu but revives each standard with new recipes; more spices, herbs, and chiles suit the tastes of peripatetic Houstonians. Stalarow, who was trained as a zoologist and learned to cook on an offshore barge near New Orleans, has an instinctual sense of the exotic. Her deep-fried, bayou-style onion dish explores the bulb’s many-layered personality.